“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, November 29, 2010

Food Studies is Still Partying Like It's 1799

This claims to be new and groundbreaking but I assure you it isn't. From a recovering food studies guy this so reinvents the wheel that I'm freshly reminded why I got out of it.

The big conclusion is “You are what you eat”—something that we've been saying to ourselves since the Romantic period (the phrase was invented twice, separately, like all good things, once in France and once in Germany). Stir in some Lacan (your identity is looped through your jouissance) and you have the recipe for things as they are.

This is precisely what we need LESS of, not more. It turns eating into fetishistic identity politics and it's a big reason for anorexia and the kind of beautiful soul environmentalism against which I've been arguing.

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